I have read a bit about the Immigration Bill and watched a discussion on Fox news between Fred Barnes, Mara Liasson, and Charles Krauthammer, and can only conclude that part of the difficulty we have had in reaching agreement on the Immigration Conundrum is that, as so often happens on contentious issues, people are using the same words to mean different things. Until we can find a way to agree on what our words actually mean, this bill will likely continue to be divisive and the Conservatives and their allies will suffer a self-inflicted defeat that will haunt them for years.
Last night Charles Krauthammer expressed his opposition to the bill. Essentially he admitted that his opposition was based on his lack of trust that the enforcement provisions in the bill would ever come to fruition; just as the 1984 Immigration bill performed better on paper than in reality, this current bill will offer amnesty to illegals, would encourage a continuing flood of illegals, and would undermine all those who are waiting in line for their chance to take part in the American dream. Both Fred Barnes and Mara Liasson thought that the bill had a good chance of passing and was a sensible approach to solving a heretofore intractable problem.
The Right side of the Blogosphere, the Conservative base, has declared open war against the bill. John Hinderaker echoes Charles Krauthammer:
This account isn't very clear, and I may well be misreading it. But it sounds as though the one thing that happens immediately is that any illegal immigrant who is now in the U.S., or makes his way here in the near future, can "come forward" and receive a "probationary card" that allows him to reside and work here. Eventual citizenship requires payment of a $5,000 fine and fulfillment of other requirements, but such a "path to citizenship" won't begin until border improvements and the employer identification system have been implemented.
What if they are never implemented, or never implemented satisfactorily? At best, that would derail the path to citizenship and the guest worker program. The one thing that we know for sure, if I am reading the AP account correctly, is that all current illegals will receive a "get out of jail free" card, as, apparently, will anyone who can make his way here in time to ask for one.
Hugh Hewitt focuses on the Conservative distress over the lack of focus on border security and attempts to mobilize the Blogosphere to defeat the bill:
The Senate GOP may believe that the anti-illegal immigration absolutists are far noisier than their numbers justify, and they would be right. But the common-sense conservatives hate being told that the best the Senate GOP can do is lose gracefully. They will be the folks outraged by the sell-out of the security fence.
As a number of people have documented, the biggest problem with the bill is that no one has actually seen it (perhaps because it doesn't exist yet) and it is likely to be voted upon before anyone will have time to read it, as is so typical of our hard working Senators and Congressmen.
Only Ed Morrissey appears to support the bill as it is presently being described:
Here's the problem with the hard-liner arguments, which amounts to "they'll never engage the border-security and workplace enforcement portions." Well, that could be true of any immigration bill, even if it completely matched the conservative position on immigration. It's an argument that only supports no action whatsoever on illegal immigration, including border controls. In fact, it applies to everything Congress passes. If that's our concern, it's an argument for non-engagement in the legislative process -- which necessarily works through making compromises that the majority in the end can support.
As I wrote yesterday, this is about as good as we will get in this Congress. In fact, the Democrats probably had enough votes to pass something much more like a wide-open amnesty, given a few Republican votes in support of that and the relaxed attitude of the White House on immigration reform. The GOP did a pretty good job of holding the line and forcing the Democrats to include the border-first triggers, the reduction of the family interest, and the rest of what Kyl managed to retain.
It's not great, and it's not even very good. It's not bad, though, and given our lack of strength in Congress and the White House on this issue, it's a good deal that will strengthen our national security now rather than wait another two years to address it. To quote the Rolling Stones, you can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. This is one of those times.
As is usual with such complex legislation, "the Devil is in the details." However, all the dissension covers one singular point. The people decrying this bill and the people supporting this bill are not talking about the same thing when they discuss "illegal" or "undocumented" aliens. There are at least four types of illegal aliens, two groups of outliers who drive the debate, and they are not all equivalent.
1) Diana Furchtgott-Roth, in the New York Sun, describes one type of illegal. These are people who were brought into the country illegally by their parents and have essentially spent their entire lives living as Americans, going through our schools, working in our economy, some quite accomplished, yet living under a cloud of threatened deportation. It is hard to imagine that very many Americans would tolerate deporting such people. I would call these people "American illegals."
2) A second group of outliers are those criminal elements who have come to America illegally with malice aforethought, to take advantage of our largess and prey upon our population. There are very few Americans who would wish to welcome such people and the support for deporting them is almost certainly near universal; this group contains within it a much smaller cohort of terrorists, who are almost the definition of the "needle in a haystack." Perhaps this group should be known as "Illegal Predators" among whom exist some minuscule number of terrorists.
3) A very large part of the problem are those who have entered our Nation illegally, essentially welcomed by our flagrant disregard of border security and enforcement, who want nothing more than to become Americans. Perhaps we can refer to them as "Proto-Americans." These people have entered America in much the same spirit as so many of our ancestors, yearning to be free. I suspect this is the majority of the illegals who are in our country. An argument can be made that they should not be allowed to skip the line ahead of those who have waited their turn and the Bill supposedly puts them at the end of the line; deporting millions of these people is not only impractical but impossible, especially once a few American Illegals are of necessity swept up in the process.
4) The second largest group would be the proto-typical illegal immigrant, an Hispanic epitomized by the Mexican illegals, here to make some money and send the bulk of it home to his family. These people do not want to become Americans but have found themselves an important niche in our economy. Because of their marginal existence, they are prone to falling into the Illegal Predators category, and are equally liable to be exploited by unscrupulous employers who benefit greatly by the lack of rights to which their workers have access. For want of a better term, these people can be referred to as "Undocumented Workers."
There are two extremely important things that any Immigration Bill must do:
1) It must secure the borders.
This remains the major hold-up for most Conservatives and is currently unanswerable since no matter what our policy on Immigration, the reality is that it depends on our government's willingness to enforce its own laws.
2) It must offer a way to differentiate the four groups, most especially the Illegal Predators.
By offering a z-visa to the Undocumented Workers and a pathway to legality for the American Illegals and Proto-Americans, we do exactly that, differentiate them from the Illegal Predators.
With the important proviso that once the bill is enacted anyone who does not register will be considered a priori an Illegal Predator and deported, to hold up such a bill because we, albeit with some very good historical evidence upon which to base our supposition, do not think the government will be serious about enforcement, seems terminally unwise. The result will be the continuation of the system that allows and encourages Illegal Predators to masquerade as Undocumented Workers and Proto-Americans. If we do not even know who is here, we will have no chance of finding the Illegal Predators and the terrorists among them.
By all means Conservatives in the House should press to include measures to increase enforcement (which apparently has increased significantly in the last year, if the number of deportations is any indication) and perhaps the threat of stalling the bill will be necessary to gain assurances that enforcement will be enforced and our borders assured, but to block the Bill entirely is short sighted.
Conservatives correctly decried the scenes of Elian Gonzalez being forced against his will to return to his country of origin. Whether right or wrong, Americans will never tolerate mass deportations, even if it were possible to actually perform them. We need a mechanism to catch the truly nefarious among the sea of hard working illegals and offer support to those who only wish to join the great American experiment, which all of us value so highly.
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